Inspiration Will Find You ….Or Not
I spoke to a group of 16-year-old art students recently in a school on the edge of Dublin. They’d just finished their Junior Cert (GCSEs for the Brits) and were trying to decide whether to take art for the Leaving Cert (A Levels). I’d painted a couple of murals at their school, and since I was passing through Dublin anyway, I stopped in for an interview series they were doing.
One question stuck with me:
”Do you care more about creativity or skill?”
I’ve spent most of my life wanting to be a “creative person”, the bohemian type with endless ideas, never bored alone, always dreaming. But you can’t fight who you are, and I’m not a natural creative. I’m someone who cares about skill, correctness, completeness, unsexy things. I kept telling myself that when I reached some imaginary level of technical ability, creativity would suddenly switch on. But creativity needs practice too. If you hide behind an unachievable standard of perfection, you don’t develop your imagination.
So this summer, when I got an opportunity to paint whatever I wanted for a public art festival, Weston Wallz, in Weston-super-Mare”, I was completely stumped. No idea what to paint.
It started in JFK on the way home from five weeks painting murals in the States. My bag was overweight by 3kg, they charged me $80, and I was already in a bad mood. I had maybe 36 hours at home before flying to Germany for Meeting of Styles. Upfest had just sent through my wall for Weston Wallz—great festival, good people, a proper wall. I had the whole flight to start designing.
Then I read the owner’s comments:
“Something bright, bold and positive. Something joyful and inspirational.”
My heart dropped. Why pick me for that?
My work is dark and moody and that’s the point. I can paint whatever I want, but I can’t.
Somehow that’s harder than just getting a brief?
Now I’m overtired, out of sorts, and flying overnight into darkness. Then something surreal happens: the sky outside looks purple, the full moon looks hot pink, and the woman beside me is asleep with this razor-sharp blonde bob glowing in the window. I wanted to take a photo (I didn’t), but I thought: That’s something I want to paint.
… Later I learned the sky wasn’t purple, the windows had a night filter, but the moment stayed.
Cut to Germany. I’m still thinking about this woman’s hair, but I need a story. I do what I always do and start researching local legends, but there are none. When the Romans came to England, they reframed local gods as Roman gods, and when they left they took the stories with them. There are myths in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Yorkshire, but for much of England, there are no “English gods” left behind.
Then, while painting in Yorkshire (where Brigantia, probably the same as the Irish Brigid btw, shows up), a client casually says, “Isn’t that where King Arthur is from?” And he’s right. Weston-super-Mare is close to Glastonbury, the legendary site of Avalon.
So there it was.
A myth.
I’d paint Guinevere.
Except… she’s no craic.
I didn’t know much about her, but I do now and she does not have a good time of it! In most stories she’s kidnapped, married off, punished for loving Lancelot, blamed for the downfall of Camelot, or dead. She’s an empty vessel, a narrative device with no agency. She needed a better story.
The next week I’m in Finland at Meeting of Styles, ranting. I know I’m painting Guinevere, but doing what? She doesn’t do anything. And the woman painting with me (shout out Miss Teal) said, “She needs to escape. She needs to be her own woman.” She’s right, but then the problem becomes: how do you paint “empowerment” without it becoming cringe? I’m hardly giving her a suit and briefcase. I shelved it. Finland was chaos anyway.
Back in London, after avoiding this design for a month, there’s nowhere left to hide.
The paint order is due.
The design has to be approved.
And I still don’t know what I’m painting.
What I did know was who I was painting, because my friend Amber had coincidentally gotten the exact haircut I’d been obsessing over. I messaged her. She had one day free in three days’ time. I was going to Brighton to take photos … and I still had nothing.
And this is when I go into the full spiral.
Pacing the house, going on long walks, wandering around galleries, dying for a bit of inspiration. Being impossible to live with because all I can think about is this mural I want to paint but can’t articulate. The pressure of doing something I care about while fitting the brief of people who offered their wall.
We’ve all been there, it starts getting a bit dark.
Why am I doing this career if I can never think of an idea?
Am I actually an artist or just a wannabe?
If I hate designing so much, should I be doing something else?
REAL artists don’t have this problem.
You know, you would never let anyone else speak to you the way you speak to yourself.
The worst part is I always pretend someone else is forcing me to paint something I don’t want, when really it’s just me doubting my own creativity.
One night, exhausted, I put my hand on my chest and told myself:
“Get over yourself. You do this every time. You always find it.”
That gesture, that hand on my own heart, was it.
Guinevere needed to take care of her own heart.
Not wait for anyone else.
Maybe she has her hand over her own heart; maybe she’s stolen it back.
She’s done with those lads and their head-wrecks and she’s escaped to the seaside, to the amusement lights and slow sunsets. Joy doesn’t need to be frantic; it can be quiet.
The idea arrived completely formed.
It had been percolating the whole time.
Ideas aren’t lightning bolts; they’re compost.
You throw in the good, the bad, the embarrassing, and something grows, eventually. My creativity is slow, messy, and uncomfortable, but it resolves itself in the end. You have to forgive the bad ideas. You have to work through them, the whole way through them, long after you hate them. They’re the mulch the good ones grow from.
I read a quote once (probably fake):
“Inspiration will find you, but it has to find you working.”
Just because you love something doesn’t mean it’s not work. A good idea doesn’t flutter into your world and land on your lap. You have to work for it!
In the end, Guinevere claimed her own heart.
And I claimed ownership of this messy, self-sabotaging system I seem to use for ideas. And sometimes, even in all the moodiness, the joy sneaks in.